The number of U.S. children living in households with extended families has greatly increased in the last 4 decades. This demographic shift calls for a reevaluation of the impact of household size on children's development. Household density (HHD), measured as the ratio of people to bedrooms in a home, has been shown to negatively relate to…

Coviewing is a commonly recommended practice, but little is known about how coviewing impacts children's educational media viewing experience. We investigated how coviewing impacts attention and comprehension of educational media, as well as the role of baseline vocabulary in understanding these associations. Eighty-three preschoolers viewed two…

Recent studies demonstrate that emerging literacy depends on earlier language achievement. Importantly, most extant work focuses on "parent-reported production" prior to 30 months of age. Of interest is whether and how "directly assessed vocabulary comprehension" in the 2nd year of life supports vocabulary and kindergarten…

Research Findings: This study investigated the association between Mexican American maternal education and socioeconomic status (SES) and child vocabulary as mediated by parental reading beliefs, home literacy environment (HLE), and parent-child shared reading frequency. As part of a larger study, maternal reports of education level, SES, HLE, and…

The purpose of this study was to empirically examine the dimensionality of language ability for young children (4-8 years) from prekindergarten to third grade (n = 915), theorizing that measures of vocabulary and grammar ability will represent a unitary trait across these ages, and to determine whether discourse skills represent an additional…

Quality literacy instruction in preschool can be critical to the future academic success for all children, but may be even more so for children with disabilities. The purpose of this study was to examine progress in emergent literacy skills of young children with disabilities, compared with their typical peers, in an inclusive preschool setting.…

The aim of this study was to examine the combined influences of infants' attention and use of social cues in the prediction of their language outcomes. This longitudinal study measured infants' visual attention on a distractibility task (11 months), joint attention (14 months), and language outcomes (word-object association, 14 months; MBCDI…

A language and literacy intervention was implemented in 10 Head Start classrooms. Teachers were trained in specific book reading and conversation strategies. The focus of the intervention was to train teachers how to increase opportunities for language and vocabulary development in young children. At the end of the year, children in the…

Examines mealtimes of preschoolers' families to determine whether rare words are used in informative ways so that a child could learn their meanings. Each use was coded for whether it was informative or uninformative; each informative exchange was coded for type of strategy used to provide support. Frequency of use was positively correlated with…

Examined the use of the mutual exclusivity constraint in naming objects among young children monolingual in English or bilingual in English/Urdu or in English/Greek. The study used three tests of the constraint: disambiguation, rejection and restriction. Findings revealed that bilingual children used the constraint to a lesser extent than…

Some 76 hearing children in prekindergarten classes, half receiving sign instruction and half not, were tested on English vocabulary acquisition. Children who received the sign instruction scored significantly higher on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test than children receiving sign instruction. (Contains 15 references.) (Author/LB)

This study examined parental report as a source of information about toddlers' productive vocabulary in 105 low-income families living in either urban or rural communities. Parental report using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory-Short Form (CDI) at child age 2;0 was compared to concurrent spontaneous speech measures and…